Idaho's Weekly Journal of Local & National Commentary Week
2815

The truth is, the
state of Idaho – i.e., the government -- is the single largest employer in
Idaho. So much for the Idaho Statesman’s absurd proclamation that
Idaho’s labor market has operated over the last two decades with little
intervention from the government. Idaho’s labor market IS the
government.

There are
so many false assumptions and economic sophisms regarding how the Statesman
editors’ proposed Fascist Business Model would work regarding “job growth,”
it is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with their first
erroneous statement and work from there.

Absurd
statement # 1: “Idaho’s labor market has
flourished for two decades, with little intervention from state government.”

The Truth:
Cities, Counties, the Idaho State Legislature, the Executive Branch, and
over 140 separate bureaus, departments, commissions, committees, and Urban
Renewal Agencies, many of whose sole function is to intervene into Idaho’s
economy, have been busy taxing the crap out of Idahoans or granting special
interest tax breaks for corporations and other groups as if there was no
tomorrow – oftentimes pulling off unconstitutional end runs around the Idaho
Constitution to spend taxpayer money without a required 2/3 majority vote of
the voters. In at least one highly publicized case, the Ada County
Courthouse fiasco in which the Commissioners and a group of lawyers, Supreme
Court Justices, and local politicians openly violated the Idaho Constitution
by creating a fake corporation that pretended to purchase and then lease the
proposed courthouse land to the Ada County Commissioners, illegally going
into multi-year debt, the Idaho Statesman’s main reporter/columnist cheered
them on. As the book, Boise’s Watergate
showed, this initial infringement – a huge governmental intervention -- was
the financial trigger that instigated a $136 million University Place fiasco
which resulted in one of the biggest financial scams in Boise’s, and the
University of Idaho’s, recent history. Everybody from ex Gov Kempthorne
through the state legislators, lobbyists, U of I Administrators, and a
private development corporation participated in this scam. Tax breaks for
corporations such as Albertson’s and Micron have not only not done anything
to help Idaho’s labor market, they have, in fact, worsened Idaho’s labor
market as major corporations are disappearing from Idaho like jackrabbits in
a brush fire including Albertson’s, Morrison-Knudsen, Boise Cascade, Micron,
GWI, and now Hewlett-Packard. The problem is not complacency or lack of
government intervention into the job market, or the market at large, but
rather too much government intervention
into what’s left of the free market. The truth is, the state of Idaho –
i.e., the government -- is the single largest employer in Idaho. So much
for the Idaho Statesman’s absurd proclamation that Idaho’s labor market has
operated over the last two decades with little intervention from the
government. Idaho’s labor market IS the
government.

Absurd
statement # 2: ”Now it’s time for a new [?? New ??]
strategy that is more proactive, and in line with the competition from other
states. It’s time for Idaho [as a
government entity] to invest in promoting
high tech and in growing its own work force. Idaho can no longer assume job
growth as a given.”

The
truth: Government intervention is not a new
strategy. It’s an old strategy called: the Fascist Business Model. Another
name for it is: socialism, or syndicalism, or communism, or fascism, or the
oxymoronic term by Keynesian socialists called “state capitalism.” All of
these ideas are bankrupt variations on the theme of a central Big Government
usurping individual rights in a vain attempt to “manage” – another
oxymoronic statement – the free market. If the government “manages” it, it
isn’t free. Implicit in the Idaho Statesman’s basic assumption is that job
growth per se is a good economic idea. Buzz, wrong!

Let’s
rethink the idea that job growth per se is good. In many cases, for a given
geographical location, job growth may be bad. If one lives in a high desert
location such as Boise, Idaho, the availability of water can be a limiting
factor for job growth. Another limiting factor might be developable real
estate. A third show stopper is: what is the psychological effect of
cramming too many people into too small a space for living, working, and
playing? So, job growth must be put into perspective for many other reasons
besides what the Left Liberal Idaho Statesman is mostly concerned about,
namely, increasing the physical population of workers in order to obtain
more tax money for its favorite Fascist Business Model programs such as
detox centers, more state education, more highways, and more Big Brother
government telling us how to spend our money.

So the
Idaho Statesman editors make a huge error by assuming that job growth per se
is “good.” It is not axiomatically good or bad but rather depends on many
other variables such as, already stated above, a finite amount of available
water in a high desert area and other parameters. The idea of job growth
itself in pure economic theory also cannot be defined automatically as
“good.” Consider how the job market in an evenly rotating economy (trying
to reach equilibrium but never does, and is not supposed to) actually
functions without government intervention.

First,
there is not a finite amount of wealth or tangible capital goods in the
market. Economics is not a zero-sum game of dividing up a finite amount of
wealth equally to everybody in the market. Also, legitimately earned wealth
is owned by individuals, not by a collective Borg. Individual rights
include private property rights. The state of Idaho does not own your house
or car or wallet. You do.

Wealth is, in fact, continually created only by
transforming ideas into time and labor-saving devices, such as
electric pumps, computers, vehicles, medical equipment, etc. Note that when
labor is saved by, say, inventing a water pump that takes the place of 100
water carriers, those 100 water carriers can then move on to perform or
transform or invent or implement other ideas into more time and labor-saving
devices – restrictive labor unions notwithstanding -- and thus a snowball
effect of capital wealth accumulation occurs that benefits EVERYBODY in the
market from the lowest laborer to the richest entrepreneur. The poorest
people benefit the most, relatively, as accumulated capital wealth drags
them up from relative poverty to (1) more leisure time, i.e., less working
hours per day and (2) more individual wealth in terms of all goods and
services per capita such as health care, home appliances, etc. It is only
when the government intervenes into the free market that goods and services
-- such as our current high cost of health care -- skyrockets.

Note,
however, that in a true free market capitalist society, job growth – i.e.,
the number of hours that workers must work to produce a given amount of
capital wealth -- can DECREASE while wealth INCREASEs. Clean your eyeballs
and re-read this statement again:

It is not
axiomatic – in fact, it is exactly the opposite – that job growth must
increase in order to increase the net wealth of a nation or a city. What we
are pointing out is that as capital wealth increases to the point of
essentially satiating the production of that which is required to sustain
the basics for survival for everybody in a given society, job growth can –
and it actually does in a capitalist market – taper off to be replaced by
leisure time job growth or non-essential working time for more and more
people. Gaming industries, sports industries, vacation industries typically
pop up in rich capitalist nations for the above reasons while Fascist
Business Model societies continue to force workers into agricultural
communes, state factories, or other government jobs that socialists claim
are necessary to advance society.

In fact,
one could argue that the ultimate consequence of continuing wealth
accumulation in a free market must necessarily, by definition, result in NO
job growth or a negative job growth (with "work" becoming voluntary free or
paid leisure time) as individuals
do not have to exert any time or labor in order to provide the basic
necessities of life. Imagine, for example, an extraterrestrial human
community on another planet in the Milky Way Galaxy in which the ET human
inhabitants spend most of their time exploring, learning, playing games, and
using robots to produce all of the basic necessities of life for them. It
is only in an Earth global community ruled by Keynesian economists trying to
implement their Fascist Business Models that “job growth” and taxation
become important to the bureaucrats and socialist ideologues with simplistic
economic myths.

Free
market economies tend toward zero exchange ratios, i.e., zero market prices
for basic goods and services, as they accumulate more capital, more wealth,
and more leisure time. Only in Fascist Business Model governments, in which
the government continually intervenes, especially with central banks that
erode the peoples’ medium of economic exchange, do market prices tend toward
infinity, due to continual “legal” counterfeiting of paper money and
hyperinflation of the non-backed paper money supply. Welcome to the U.S.A.
and the quasi-private Federal Reserve system.

Given
their non-understanding of even the basic concepts of free market economics,
it is not surprising that the Left Liberal editors at the Idaho Statesman
think that their idea of “job growth” and its concomitant taxation of more
and more people for more and more government programs is the only way to
increase prosperity for the masses. It isn’t. Our current Recession is the
result of the type of thinking espoused by the editors at the Idaho
Statesman.

And that’s
exactly why it’s so important that one political group does not get to
replace the free market with their personal – and erroneously disastrous --
Fascist Business Model ideas. Socialism is a recipe for economic disaster.
We suggest the Idaho Statesman should check its premises before trying to
force a $50 million dollar state “job growth” program down everybody’s
throat to supposedly stimulate the Idaho economy. The economy does not need
to be “stimulated” by the state. The economy needs only individual freedom
and objective law.

The free
market is not “complacency,” as the Statesman has intimated. Nor is the
free market an “accident,” as they have further stated. The market – sans
government intervention -- is the net result of trillions of subjective
evaluations every day by free individuals exercising their inherent Natural
Given rights under the Constitutions of Idaho and the United States,
voluntarily deciding how to exchange ideas, goods, and services with each
other. The last thing we need in Idaho is more “job growth” driven by state
government and more taxation. One could make a good argument that Boise and
the Treasure Valley have already reached its population limit due to
parameters such as available water and livable land.

“Job
growth” as a free market phenomenon is a nonsensical issue since everybody
who wants to work in a free market is not prohibited from doing so. Only in
statist Keynesian economics do terms such as “job growth,” GDP, trade
surplus, trade deficits, and other Keynesian econometric terms take on their
collectivist meanings created by central bankers and collectivist
politicians who are busy robbing the people via “forced” currency
manipulation. Witness the cause of our current U.S. and global Recession.

It is in
this vein that the Idaho Statesmen wants to blow $50 million of taxpayer
money in a bureaucratic attempt (with a High Tech Panel) to increase Idaho’s
“working” population so they can tax more people for more Big Government.
It’s a never-ending vicious circle of tax and spend and tax and spend. The
Statesman even thinks, erroneously, that increasing Idaho’s education system
will increase the “job growth,” which, in turn, they think will increase
taxation, which will then increase revenue for even more of the same.

But the
Statesman’s definition of “job growth” is not the solution for anything in
Idaho – or anywhere else -- because taxation for more government programs is
not the goal. Once again, at its basic premises, this is another moral
philosophical rights issue pitting the collectivist state vs. the individual
and private property rights. In fact, with our current overpopulation as
the major cause of most of Earth humans’ current problems from pollution to
using up limited food supplies in our oceans to overcrowding, what Idaho
really needs is a program of No Growth, not more growth. – FM Duck